The individuals and companies that own the biggest sports franchises in America are already an exclusive club of very rich and very powerful people, pretty much without exception. This means that these individuals and companies have access to and take advantage of the very best lawyers and accountants so as to maximize their "investments" in these franchises. Not too surprisingly, when you are use to getting your way, you pretty much are not interested in any obstacles that will negatively impact your assets.
The thing about sports is that you have the actual sports franchise, the stadium or arena for the events, ticket sales to the actual games, along with television and radio access to them, to which all of these things when integrated together create synergy and that synergy helps to create or to improve cash allocation and to increase net worth. There are very large media companies that have owned sports franchise such as Disney and Comcast, as well as individuals that have owned their own teams along with their own network, such as Turner Broadcasting, in addition to sweetheart deals that have been constructed for sports owners and the actual stadiums that are built for their team to play in, such as Jerry Jones and the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
The bottom line for sports ownership is that in one way or another, no matter how it is structured, they have an abiding interest in seeing that they as owners benefit the most, while sticking taxpayers and assorted governmental sycophants with subsidizing their grandiose dreams. For sports owners, it is all about having total control or the abiding influence of the product that they are peddling to the public so that they can maximize their revenue while sticking others with responsibilities that don't negatively impact them, so if a stadium is built to house a particular sports franchise at taxpayer's expense, owners are wont to re-negotiate contracts in such a manner so as to benefit them, lest they find a better deal elsewhere, and thereby stick the taxpayers with a "white elephant" and unserviceable debt.
The sports owners know that a symbiotic, partnership, or ownership relationship with a leading media company, allows them to control the product for their benefit. That is to say, when a media company has a vested interest in certain sports franchises this fundamentally means better and more complete exposure of that team, maximum control of content distributed throughout all media channels, so that dissenting views are never allowed the light of day, and the ability to apply leverage on advertisers of all sorts for the betterment of the sports owner/media company.
The franchise of the sports owner doesn't belong to the city, it belongs to the owner of such, which is why stadium and arena deals are often structured so poorly for taxpayers and are so beneficial to the actual owners of the team. The media outlets need product, which in conjunction with the sports owner they are able to integrate in such a manner so as to benefit both parties, by having exclusivity to each other, and thereby freezing out of the market territorial upstarts. This means for a fan that the control of your favorite local team is never in your hands, but that instead the content is brought to you as one carefully designed, slickly produced, and wholly integrated product, to which, the public relations of it all is to sucker you into believing that the product being displayed is your team, when in fact, that is the very last thing that it is.